Which Song is Your Time Machine?
Plus a Very Good moisturizer, earlier concerts, and my morning routine lol
The other day a song I hadn’t thought of in years popped into my head.
It’s a song that instantly transports me back to Matt Studivan’s dorm room at Emerson College where he booted up whichever illegal streaming service we used back in the golden days of 2002 to play it for me through the speakers of his bulky Dell desktop. He’s one of the only sensitive/artsy boys from my past that never crossed the border from platonic buddy to toxic complication. He was great! But anyway, this song wasn’t The Strokes’ “This Is It” which transports me back to being stoned out of my mind in that same dorm room playing some sort of humiliating theatre-kid game in which we passed invisible balls to each other in a circle, and it wasn’t Modest Mouses’s “Float On” which transports me instantly to “getting ready” (choosing a “going out top,” applying a shitload of eyeshadow, liner, and mascara in hopes of creating the ultimate smoky eye, and eating microwaved Mama Celeste individual pan pizzas) with my sister and two best friends before we conquered the dive bars of Back Bay, where we seductively sipped our diet coke and vodkas (!!!!!!!!!) and waited for adventure to befall us. It also wasn’t anything by Bright Eyes which instantly transports me back to being high on the potential romance of my own life.
It wasn’t any of these songs, which I still encounter with varying degrees of regularity in restaurants, on the radio, or in the background at friends’ homes.
It was this little ditty.
While all the aforementioned songs have transportive properties (for me), within a single chord, this song instantly erases the cynicism, weariness, and experience of the last two decades and makes me feel fresh, new, and pulsating with possibility. It makes me feel like I’m 22.
Everyone has a song like this, and while OF COURSE, these songs vary widely across genre and subject, I suspect many of them share the following characteristics.